Windows 8

[lambchops511]

I have CentOS happily installed on my machine and now I want to add Windows 8 to the mix. I have an empty new harddrive for that. What is the proper procedure to install this? If I go ahead and install Windows 8 to the new hard drive will it wipe the MBR of my old drives etc...? I suppose I need to somehow update my grub entries as well?

Thanks.

 

[fread2281]

Oh god centos....
You probably want to add it to grub: google.
The installer should leave other HDDs alone.

 

[mfenn]

Oh god centos....
You probably want to add it to grub: google.
The installer should leave other HDDs alone.

More like "Oh god Windows installer doing all sorts of nonsense without asking".

OP, you will want to physically disconnect all other drives while installing Windows to make sure that the Windows bootloader goes where it's told. Make sure it works in a "default" configuration first.

Then you'll need to reconnect all your drives and modify your grub.conf to add a chainloader statement. Something like the following where X is the disk number of the Windows disk (as grub sees it) and Y is the partition number on X containing the Windows bootloader (likely 0).

title Windows 8
        rootnoverify (hdX,Y)
        chainloader (hdX,Y)+1

 

[lambchops511]

More like "Oh god Windows installer doing all sorts of nonsense without asking".

OP, you will want to physically disconnect all other drives while installing Windows to make sure that the Windows bootloader goes where it's told. Make sure it works in a "default" configuration first.

Then you'll need to reconnect all your drives and modify your grub.conf to add a chainloader statement. Something like the following where X is the disk number of the Windows disk (as grub sees it) and Y is the partition number on X containing the Windows bootloader (likely 0).

title Windows 8
        rootnoverify (hdX,Y)
        chainloader (hdX,Y)+1

Thats what I did the first time (almost exactly). Windows won't boot after that... I'm thinking I would have to let Windows wipe my boat loader and then reinstall via rescue? Or is there a better way?

 

[mfenn]

Thats what I did the first time (almost exactly). Windows won't boot after that... I'm thinking I would have to let Windows wipe my boat loader and then reinstall via rescue? Or is there a better way?

All a Linux rescue installer is going to do is replace grub and add a chainloader statement to the configuration. You need to mess around with the different permutations of disk and partition number, keeping in mind that GRUB's view of what a disk number is isn't the same as Windows's or Linux's also try the raw disk numbers (i.e. without ,partnum ). If you get an error from Windows, post it here.